Fo­rum: Top­ics in­clude cul­tures in cy­berspace

Sev­eral no­ta­bles at­tend­ing the fo­rum, such as In­dian film star Aamir Khan and French Si­nol­o­gist David Gos­set, were also greeted by Wang.

On Wed­nes­day, Prodi noted the im­por­tance of the fo­rum in­tro­duc­ing Chi­nese cul­ture and also open­ing the na­tion to other cul­tures with dif­fer­ent ori­gins and roots.

“To be open, we’d bet­ter not only talk, but also lis­ten,” Prodi said at the con­fer­ence’s ex­ec­u­tive board meet­ing. He also ex­pressed his wor­ries over the dif­fi­cul­ties the world is fac­ing to­day, when mis­trust among coun­tries is all too wide­spread.

“Cul­ture is chang­ing,” he con­tin­ued. “But we have to find how to in­ter­pret the mean­ing of cul­ture in the con­text of the 21st cen­tury … We need to bet­ter trans­late our own cul­tures and have them bet­ter un­der­stood and re­ceived by oth­ers.”

The Taihu World Cul­tural Fo­rum, named for Taihu Lake in the Yangtze River Delta, was cre­ated in 2008.

The in­au­gu­ral con­fer­ence was held in 2011 in Suzhou, Jiangsu prov­ince, by the lake, and was fol­lowed by meet­ings in Hangzhou, cap­i­tal of Zhe­jiang prov­ince, and in Shang­hai and Ma­cao.

This year’s con­fer­ence, co-hosted by China Daily and sup­ported by civil diplo­macy in­sti­tu­tions and aca­demic in­sti­tutes, will dis­cuss the cul­tural sig­nif­i­cance of eco­nomic glob­al­iza­tion, peo­ple-to-peo­ple con­nec­tiv­ity un­der the frame­work of the Belt and Road Ini­tia­tive, and ecofriendly de­vel­op­ment through themed fo­rums.

The dis­cus­sion will also take in the use of new tech­nolo­gies in mu­seum op­er­a­tions, cul­tural di­ver­sity in the film in­dus­try, the re­vival of tra­di­tional medicine and new cul­tures grown in cy­berspace.

Much work has been done to pro­mote cul­tural ex­changes since the found­ing of the fo­rum. For ex­am­ple, a meet­ing on com­mu­ni­ca­tion among dif­fer­ent civ­i­liza­tions along the an­cient Silk Road was or­ga­nized by the fo­rum in 2014 in Paris, France.

High-level sym­po­siums on tra­di­tional Chi­nese medicine were held in 2012 and 2014.

The fo­rum also has gone be­yond ex­changes of thought. In 2017, a cen­ter for for­eign lead­ers to ex­pe­ri­ence tra­di­tional Chi­nese medicine opened in Bei­jing. In May, the fo­rum an­nounced it would work with the Palace Mu­seum in Bei­jing to launch a “cul­tural par­lor of Chi­nese civ­i­liza­tion”.

Some ar­eas in the mu­seum also are to be used for lec­tures on Chi­nese philoso­phies, stage per­for­mances of tra­di­tional Chi­nese fine arts and dis­plays of cul­tural cre­ativ­ity prod­ucts.

ZOU HONG / CHINA DAILY

Wang Chen, a mem­ber of the Po­lit­i­cal Bu­reau of the Com­mu­nist Party of China Cen­tral Com­mit­tee and vice-chair­man of the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee of the Na­tional Peo­ple’s Congress, meets with Ro­mano Prodi, former Ital­ian prime min­is­ter and hon­orary chair­man of the Taihu World Cul­tural Fo­rum, in Bei­jing on Wed­nes­day.